The Girl With All The Gifts is a refreshing take on zombies

You’ve seen the film, now read the book that inspired World War Z (Graphic: iandodds.co.uk)

The Girl With All The Gifts by MR Carey (Orbit)

Zombies are flesh-eating flavour of the month. If vampires have been co-opted as the perfect, pallid romantic emo boyfriend, the flesh-eating undead are the unlovely lumpen rest of us, hanging out in shopping malls, staring into space until the prospect of convenience food piques their interest.

You’d be forgiven for thinking there wasn’t much that could be added in the way of a new twist to George A Romero’s definitive recipe after their starring role in Pride And Prejudice And Zombies. In MR Carey’s terrific speculative-fiction thriller The Girl With All The Gifts, though, the ancient Greek myth of Pandora, the girl whose curiosity led her to open the box and unleash horrors into the world, and an inter-species love story, combine to create a book that is original, vividly memorable and unexpectedly poignant.

Melanie is a preternaturally bright ten-year-old with a crush on her sympathetic teacher, Miss Justineau, who inspires her love of learning. Unlike most schoolchildren, though, she is taken, strapped into a wheelchair, from her cell to her class.

What emerges very quickly in Carey’s fast-paced tale, is that Melanie, undead yet with high-functioning human abilities, is part of an experiment: one of a class full of specimens contained in a bunker as humans try desperately to work on a cure in a blighted future world overrun by a plague that has turned most of the population into hungries (the Z-word is never mentioned).

It is not long before the fragile status quo is threatened as the base is overrun by a band of feral survivalists called junkers who are herding the hungries as cannon-fodder. Melanie, Miss Justineau, old-school military man Sergeant Parks and the young soldier Gallagher and scientist Caroline Caldwell, who regards Melanie as her prime specimen and wants to dissect her brain, form a mismatched band who take to the road in a burned-out, post-apocalyptic Britain.

It is a race against the odds: hungries are everywhere; the e-blocker that stops humans from smelling like dinner is running out, and Melanie has to fight her own newly aroused urges to feed.

MR Carey is the pseudonym for comic-book heavyweight Mike Carey, author of the Felix Castor novels and comics for both DC and Marvel. He takes genre conventions – among them beleaguered heroes in a race to survive against overwhelming odds – and uses them with surefooted skill, verve and wit.

The Girl With All The Gifts is a white-knuckle ride that lurches from one heart-in-mouth situation to another, with Carey the keen-eyed operator who knows how to make you scream to go faster. But like all the best genre fiction, The Girl With All The Gifts transcends its conventions to offer an extraordinary take on how people respond in extreme circumstances. In this case, his most exceptional achievement is the relationship between Melanie and Miss Justineau.

Melanie is more appealing than any flesh-eating, precious child genius has any right to be. Helen Justineau, whose character might have risked becoming a PC do-gooder, has enough edge to her, and layers of backstory, to make her response to Melanie genuinely moving.

The emotional flesh on the bones of a thrilling, colourful story is the way their bond shifts between that of teacher and pupil, mother and child and protector and protected but is always pure, fierce and true.

A thrilling and colourful story (Picture: Supplied)

TAKE FOUR: MORE ZOMBIE BOOKS TO GET YOUR TEETH INTOHandling the Undead by John Ajvide Lindqvist
Another slice of atmospheric Scandi-gothic from the author of vampire tale Let The Right One In. This take on zombies finds Stockholm undergoing strange electrical phenomena and a young man in the grip of hope as his dead wife begins to reanimate in the morgue.

World War Z by Max Brooks
Now a Hollywood blockbuster starring Brad Pitt, this sees a former United Nations investigator travelling the globe to find a cure for a zombie pandemic. Brooks’s 2006 novel was a follow-up to his satirical 2003 manual The Zombie Survival Guide and took itself much more seriously.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith
This mash-up between genteel Jane Austen and B-movie gorefest offers a parallel Regency England overrun by the undead, and Mr Darcy as a crack zombie hunter.

Feed by Mira Grant
Two bloggers go on a quest to discover the truth about the conspiracy behind events 20 years earlier, when scientists who found a cure for the common cold unwittingly created a zombie pandemic.